SIMPLICITY

Once the simplicity of my songs was their meaninglessness

satisfied with what they found, a shred of greenery

that shrouded our house and a larger shred that shrouded

the khaki creek, dark placid with unease, sparkling

of leaf death and offal, a mirror clearer than fresh days,

deeper than a cloudless night its never breaking and

never speaking surface. What else then were my yips

but acceptable amid sparrow chatter and the invisibles chiming,

crickets and cicadas, and the stir, the snaps, the blunders

of big grasshoppers, poplar-leaf-netherside in hue:

sounds of their legs releasing a stalk, that wags now, wild

grass or wheat, and then their claws catching another,

or the flight of one who fell, click, after which we'd find him

impassive, on a stone let's say or bald patch of baked field,

staring wisely, as if the journey had gone just as long planned.

So it's possible to know too much: for instance, now, that dying

was that place I woke to as life. So my first, simplest

songs, a child's shouts, nothing but life, soaked,

buried and smothered in life, lost in life's thorax,

were wrong. So my tongue was molded by an already old

community of disease and the glories of my eyes were a late

remnant, lute remnant, the feminine lusciousness

and green ray were a greyed-over rind of what had been

before I was formed, a phlegm spit up of the true,

the dead splendor that no one now alive could ever grasp:

our splendor was its corpse

and I had to go forward into the almost birdless treeless

town we had built by cannibalizing the hardened blocks

of aftermath,

there to fight to live, even live well, as some did,

and fight to take away their words, steal them, deform,

make them my own, stones made adequate

to crumble and tower the song of gratitude that is still enjoined.